Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Spotlight: Out of the Cave by Cotton E. Davis

Today we have an excerpt from Out of the Cave (A Timewarp Inc Novel) by Cotton E. Davis! Out of the Cave is a unique fantasy about a neanderthal boy who grows up in the future after being transported out of the past! Check out the synopsis:

“A neanderthal boy is time transported to the 21st century and eventually mainstreamed into a public high school.

The year is 2036. Fifteen-year-old-Kelly Tracer moves to Rivertown, Missouri, population 1900, where she enrolls in the local high school to begin her sophomore year. Imagine Kelly's surprise when she learns of another newcomer to Rivertown High, a sophomore like herself: a boy from 40,000 years in the past. A Neanderthal.

Further imagine Kelly's shock when she learns Neanderthals were not fellow Homo sapiens but were instead a separate species of humans unto themselves. She remembers the boy being time transported to the twenty-first century from watching the news when she was six years old. Now, nine years later, he is being mainstreamed.

Kelly is further surprised when she sees Adam (the name humans have given him) in the flesh. Like his long-extinct people, he is heavily muscled with thick brow ridges above his eyes and possessed of a protruding muzzle of a mouth and only a slight chin. Then there is his humongous, spreading nose. More thuggish than simian-looking, Adam's primitive looks put Kelly off. Scare her even.

Kelly gets another surprise. Adam speaks English like an American. Raised by scientists since his sixth year, he sounds just like any other American kid, except for a touch of bass in his voice's timbre. Also, Adam is nothing like the dully fierce caveman stereotype Kelly expected. Aside from being shy, he is mild and thoughtful and quite considerate of the feelings of others. Adam is also very mature for his few years; an evolutionary response, according to his paleoanthropologist adoptive father, to living in the harsh conditions of a major Ice Age.

Not surprisingly, Kelly finds herself liking him.

You guessed it, Kelly and Adam will eventually become an item. But, before that, they'll go through enough tribulations to try the patience of a saint. After-all, the world is no more perfect in the year 2036 than it was in Adam's time.”

Excerpt from Out of the Cave:

Together we watched a picture projected onto the suspended halo-screen floating in the air a few inches away. Aloud, Diane read that it was a color-enhanced painting done by Charles R. Knight more than a century ago, depicting a clan of Neanderthals standing outside the mouth of a dark cave. There were five adults, three powerfully muscled males, a hoary old man, plus an incredibly ugly woman with a naked child. One of the males, thick with sinew and holding a crude spear, nodded toward a herd of wooly rhinos in the distance. His muzzle-like face and slanting forehead made me think of movie monsters or some creature from a Tolkien fantasy.

"One of those things is coming here!" I said, a little put off.

Diane nodded. "Isn't it exciting?"

About the Author:

Cotton E. Davis was born in Washington, Missouri in 1946. He graduated high school there in 1964 and later joined the U.S Air Force, where he eventually became part of an air reconnaissance flight crew that flew missions over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Subsequent to discharge, he earned a Journalism Degree from the University of Missouri. He has worked on newspapers, was a stringer on two magazines, managed restaurants, free-lanced magazine articles and written several novels. Davis is currently retired and lives in mid-Missouri.